ARM and x86 prepare for battle in UMDland

There is an interesting article at XBit Labs by Anton Shilov. He talks about the upcoming battle between ARM and X86 for UMDs. To put some of this in perspective, consider that the UMDs are lower power devices than even low-end PCs, but higher power than the average handheld.

In July, 2008, Nvidia rolled out their Tegra platform which is designed to go against Intel’s Atom platform. Tegra is ARM-based, while Atom is x86-based. While the concept of having a general compute device operate on one CPU or another really doesn’t matter to most consumers, the reality is there are differences which should be considered.

x86 is ubiquitous in PC spaces. There are really no alternate CPUs that are of consequence in the average desktop, notebook or netbook spaces. If you want to have a product, there is such a massively comprehensive set of software already in place that it’s suicide to enter that market with something alternate.

The same is not true with UMDs and related devices.

Intel and AMD have been looking for years to push into this lower-margin, yet wider sales base of products. With Atom, everybody thought Intel had nailed it … until we saw Atom that is. While impressive, it’s not ready yet. It needs more for the lowest-end markets.

Intel sold off their ARM-based division, called XScale, in June, 2006. Since then they have focused entirely on x86. Startup Nvidia (in this market) has decided that ARM has its place as there is an even larger base of software for small-end ARM products than there is for high-end x86-based PCs.

The war is going to continue. ARM has moved to 32-bit and 64-bit implementations over the years, and is a very adequate architecture. It has a robust ISA that enables a great many software saving features via set flags in the instruction encodding.

x86, on the other hand, while capable of doing everything, is not as eloquent or has not been revised significantly over the years – only extended.

Considering it all, the battle will be in the marketplace. And I fear that the presentation of software will be the deciding feature as consumers will be looking for functionality above all else. If it lasts an extra 30 minutes or an hour on a single charge, I believe consumers would choose the one that works better for the shorter period of time over the longer lasting one that, perhaps, doesn’t have as much “eye candy.”

It will be interesting to see what happens. Can ARM defeat x86’s invasion into the UMD space?